“Why would someone want to dig around in my memories?” I said. “Long ago and some best left forgotten.”
“But you haven’t forgotten, have you Mrs. Mac? Yours goes back to, what age did you say?” Haley laughed and made the “snuk, snuk” noise I’d told her about, when my dad took me out of church and spanked me for being a hellion and me, embarrassed at not being able to control my snorty sniffles when we came back in.
“Dad said later I would have been three. Apparently, it cured me of being a hellion.” I smiled, remembering Dad, a gentle man but a firm believer in the ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ biblical adage.
“Bet that’s one of the earliest memories Chris will hear.” Haley plumped up my pillow and turned down the sheet. “And I think Mrs. D is going to join.”
I said if Marie—Mrs. D to Haley—was interested, I would consider it. When Marie moved to the room across from me three months ago, she struggled to settle in, and I could relate: When I moved here five years ago, after a broken hip that didn’t heal properly, I had hated almost everything—needing help bathing, the meals, giving up a home for what? A room, even if it was one of the larger private ones, thanks to the kids helping with the cost. But over time, I’d had to admit I couldn’t manage on my own after Harold died and that I needed the care.
So I tried to help Marie, inviting her to my room to watch a show we both enjoy, encouraging her to join outings the home puts together so we don’t fall asleep and drool in our chairs. We both pass on Bingo and church services but enjoy reading, although my eyes tire easily, so we’ve swapped books, a two-member book club. She taught me Backgammon and we play most days now.
I agreed to meet ‘Call-Me-Chris’ Young, who was conducting research among older adults for her PhD in Psychology. She was persuasive but gentle and promised that if I ever felt uncomfortable, I could drop out. Turns out the project wasn’t purely about memory. Standard memory tests were to determine if we still had most of our marbles—my words, not hers—so she could assess how accurate our actual memories would be. Her research would then look at how factors like lifestyle, family upbringing, education, would correlate with memory retention over time. I decided it would pass the time; after all, memories are pretty much where I live now.
And there was no way I would let Chris unearth all my memories.
The project was once a week for an hour. Chris went through my upbringing, the rural influence, laughing at some of my one-room schoolhouse memories—I realize that I was a bit of a hellion there, too, like getting the strap for helping to stick the school crybaby’s scarf on the broken flagpole. She was interested in whether early beliefs had changed over the years, did I remember turning points, were some memories more vivid than others.
When we talked about high school, she teased out my memory of Doris.
I still cringe, seven decades later, when I think of my unquestioning, judgemental 16-year-old self that day in the high school’s side lobby, waiting for my school bus with the rest of the farm kids. I caught the eye of Doris, one of the Grade 12 girls, who was obviously pregnant. I looked away and pretended to check my books, and certainly didn’t smile; she was clearly a sinner, and not someone I would ever have as a friend. Same as the kids who smoked at lunch time barely off school property, flaunting their wrongdoing—not as major a transgression as pre-marital sex but still, in God’s eyes, a sin is a sin is a sin and Judgement Day would come. Like in the parable of a shepherd separating sheep from the goats, the righteous, obedient sheep would spend a blissful eternity with God walking streets of gold and the unrighteous, wayward goats would be damned to eternal hellfire. When I thought of teachings like this later, I found it ironic that we had both sheep and goats on the farm and the sheep were the dumb, unthinking followers, the goats the smart ones.
Back then, I pitied people who believed salvation wasn’t guaranteed, or who thought they had to confess sins through a priest—we Baptists went straight to the head honcho. And a lot of people went to church only once a week! No mid-week prayer meetings for them! Not like us who were instructed to pray “without ceasing” like the apostle Paul taught, to somehow be in touch with God in everything you do or say.
“Such a short incident but you’ve hung on to it a long time, why do you think that is?”
I took my time answering, that Doris memory nestled too close to other memories. “Maybe because it’s an action, or I guess, lack of action, that I regretted for years. We have choices, don’t we?” I read the Victor Frankl quote that I’d hung on my wall to remind me to think before I flap my lips.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to
choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. – Victor Frankl
“That time, sometimes just a second or two, between what we feel or see and what we do about it.” I felt the sting of unbidden tears. “And I chose to judge. What if I’d even simply smiled at Doris, showed her I saw her as a person, not a sinner? What if that judgement limited my freedom to grow as a person, for a while anyway?”
“I feel like there’s more to this memory for it to still be so strong,” Chris said. “Were there other triggers for it over the years?”
I mentioned that I’d followed the battle years ago to legalize abortion and wondered what Doris would have done if abortion was legal. And when my tears threatened again, Chris waited and said finally, “There’s more, isn’t there?” I have to hand it to Chris, she’s very, very patient. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Harold. I’d held it tight, afraid that if I let it out, I’d be judged, that whoever I told would think less of me. And now, Chris stayed long over our hour and listened.
It was partway through third-year university and some radical changes in my thinking later and I thought of how incredibly brave Doris had been to stay in school, to face the daily unspoken condemnation of holier-than-thous like me. And I questioned—who set the rules I had now broken, who decreed what was right or wrong? Who said what you must believe?
Abortion would be a sin worse than the one I’d already committed—my mind still refusing to relinquish its hold on years of teachings—and I had no idea how to get one anyway. My family would want me to either marry the boyfriend or take an ever-so-convenient break away from university, long enough to give the baby up for adoption and we would never talk about it again. But I knew, deep down, I didn’t love the boyfriend, nor did he love me, our attraction had been mostly physical. I didn’t tell him, broke it off, and started planting the idea with friends that I needed a break from school. I’d take the break, find a home for unwed mothers—that’s what they called it then—give up the baby, and no one would know.
But my roommate clued in to the morning sickness. We’d shared a double room in residence in first year and continued to share an apartment off-campus. We should have been oil and water, me, narrow-minded and religious and Colleen, a critical thinker and agnostic, but somehow, we hit it off, then, and until her death forty-one years later. Those many years ago, Colleen never ridiculed my thinking, but encouraged me to question. After I fit in a Comparative Religions course in second year, there was no turning back on revisiting beliefs I’d sponged up and never squeezed to see if they held water. The more I questioned, the more I believed that the God I’d thought of as a just but loving deity was an unpredictable and vengeful being. I ultimately discovered that the Biblical “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was in every creed and religion in one form or another. Didn’t that cover how we should all live? Even though I often fail miserably, I try to practice it, like helping Marie adjust.
Back then, Colleen came with me to a clinic that counselled, and depending on your decision, provided certain services safely and quietly. I justified my choice: I could finish university, choose the career I was working towards, my family wouldn’t be shamed. I carried the guilt for years and even now question what I’ve come to see, not as sin, but as cowardice and selfishness. Colleen, the abortion doctor and nurse, and now Chris, are the only people I’ve told.
“Mrs. Mac,” Chris said, “I’ve been in many homes now and you’d be surprised how many women I’ve interviewed have had similar experiences and tried to bury them like you.” Chris hugged me as she left that day. “Time maybe to let it go?” Her words were a comfort. I didn’t feel the guilt I thought would surface in the telling although I didn’t sleep well, revisiting those long-ago days.
Haley was on the next morning and said, “Tough night, Mrs. Mac?” Guess she noticed the extra bags under my eyes after my restless night. I pointed to them, said, “Honey, these aren’t bags, they’re suitcases.” Well, she laughed and then—this is how sweet she is—she said, “Mrs. Mac, you’ve got a lot of valuables packed in those suitcases. All your experience, all you’ve learned.”
Haley’s part time, working her way through university. I asked her one day if she worked here because she couldn’t get something better. “It must be depressing taking care of old people all day, hoisting our ugly bodies around…”
First time I saw her get downright stern with me. “Mrs. Mac, your body isn’t ugly.” Then she said, “I figure, if I’m lucky, I’ll be old one day too, and someday, maybe someone will be helping me bathe, right? I’m just treating you like I’d want to be treated.” The girl’s a walking Golden Rule.
Privately, I still think it must be depressing to see crepey skin, age spots that melt into each other, everything that’s lost the battle with gravity—boobs, butt, flibbery skin—but on bath days, Haley says, “Let’s get ‘er done and make it fun,” talking a mile a minute.
Marie and I hadn’t gotten to a stage in our friendship of comparing much more than books, where we’d lived in the city, how many kids, jobs. But Marie was enjoying what she called the Memory Lane project and one day she said, “What a ride I’m having! All the way back to Madison High!”
“You went to Madison?” I knew Marie was only a few years older than me and it was a small rural school but I didn’t remember a Marie.
“You too?” Marie said.
“Yes,” I said, then tentatively, “Do you remember a girl named Doris?”
Marie laughed. “I think everybody in the school remembered Doris! The pregnant one! Scandal!” She fluttered her hands dramatically and laughed again. “See? You remember even after all these years.”
“Do you know how she did? She didn’t come back after Grade 12 and I’ve always wondered how she managed…”
We were sitting around her small coffee table and Marie must have registered my distress, my Doris memory that I had so recently revisited with Chris still unsettling me.
“I know exactly how she did.” She laughed again. “Doris was my first name. I changed to my middle name, Marie, before I got married.”
“You? You’re Doris?” I managed to finally say, “Do you remember…” I cleared my throat and started again. “I was in Grade 10, we were waiting for our school buses and you looked at me. Do you remember?”
“I looked at you? Surprising—I pretty much kept my head down. But no, I don’t remember, does it matter?”
I told her what I’d told Chris, the shame I’d felt for years for being so judgemental, how brave she was, how much I admired her. I apologized.
“Oh, my dear Ruth, you’ve carried this all these years?” I saw tears in her eyes as she reached for my hand. “Ruth, there is no need to apologize. Even if you didn’t smile or talk to me, you didn’t call me ‘easy’—or worse—like a lot of the boys, or turn your back and whisper ‘slut’ loud enough for me to hear when I walked by the lockers. And I don’t hold it against those kids—it was a different time.”
I looked at our old hands together. Marie hadn’t judged even those who had done or said worse than my silent judgement.
Her parents helped care for her son, she said, while she finished her high school equivalency, then university, arranging classes as much as possible so she could be with him four days out of seven. She’d met her future husband in third year and they’d had two daughters. When I asked why she changed her name, she laughed.
“Imagine, Ruth! My husband’s surname was Day.” She had an infectious giggle and struggled to continue. “He thought it would be amusing to say he was married to Doris Day and he’d sing that song of hers,” and when she tried to sing ‘Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be,’ we dissolved in fits of laughter like giddy children. When we could talk again, she said she’d ditched Doris and used her middle name since before she was married.
When I left, I couldn’t resist singing “Que sera sera!” as I got to the door and delighted in the sound of her laughter following me. My steps seemed lighter and even my walker seemed to glide more smoothly, the pain in my hip barely noticeable.
I kept humming and came to the line ‘The future’s not ours to see.’ When I moved here, I resigned myself to filling in time until they pulled the curtains around my bed. But here I was at 86 with a good friend for whatever time we had left. A friend who I knew wouldn’t judge me for my actions so long ago.
And I’d learned an invaluable lesson. I had let my self-judgement weigh me down for years, not only for that old memory but for my own choice six years after that.
Time to let the weight go.
Lois Hibbert explores memories in short memoir writing and also writes short stories, flash fiction, and occasionally, poetry. Her work has been published in various online and print journals and her debut novel will be published in the spring of 2026.